On Monday, May 14, a new Prayer Room opened in the Regenstein Library. The Prayer Room was made possible by the support of the Office of the Provost, Spiritual Life and the Library. The Prayer Room is located on the B-Level in Room B-60.

Requests for access may be sent to spirit@uchicago.edu. Requests need to include name, ChicagoID number (printed on the back of the UChicago Card) and department or year in the College. Once access is granted, your ID card will unlock the room, which may be used during Regenstein building hours.

The University of Chicago offers a plethora of resources to help you navigate through your second year and beyond. The number of places you can go to enhance your experience can be overwhelming, but the University of Chicago Library, College Programming Office (CPO), and College Center for Scholarly Advancement (CCSA) has your back! Come to the A-Level of the Regenstein Library on Friday April 6th to learn about how these offices can help you on your journey to success:

Chicago Studies

College Center for Scholary Advancement (National Fellowships)

Drop In Academic Advising

English Language Institute Programs

Global Health Research Fellows Program

Language Study Programs

Institute of Politics

Mellon Mays Fellows Program

Neighborhood Schools Project

University of Chicago Library

Stevanovich Center

Study Abroad

During the event, the Library will also be offering workshops and a Special Collections Open House to learn more about research tools and materials to support your coursework:

Jump-Start Research in Your Major, Room A-11, 3:15–3:45 p.m.
Learn about Learn about resources available through the Library to support research in your field of study, including research guides, specialized databases, and subject librarians.

Special Collections Research Center Open House, 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Discover the amazing sources available in the Special Collections Research Center for your coursework or research. The open house features examples of the Library’s holdings in rare books, manuscripts, and University of Chicago Archives. Special Collections staff will be on hand to answer questions about our collections and the many research possibilities they afford.

Stay Organized and Cite Right with Zotero, Room A-11, 3:45-4:15 p.m.
Zotero is a free citation manager that helps you organize your research and create citations and bibliographies in a variety of styles like MLA, APA, and Chicago. Drop by for a brief demo of this great tool that will change the way you do research.

Raymond Gadke provided scholarly resources to four decades of researchers and mentorship to generations of College students at the University of Chicago. He died this week at age 74.

Raymond Gadke, 1943-2018. Inspired by a fondness for Elvis Presley’s garb in “Blue Hawaii,” Ray made Hawaiian shirts his regular uniform, and librarians directed patrons needing help with microfilms to find him based on his signature look. (Photo by John Zich)

Ray came to the University of Chicago as a master’s student in the Division of the Humanities with a strong interest in history, conducting research on the Catholic Church, completing his AM in 1966 and joining the Library staff in 1969. His early interests, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, giving nature, and close relationships with researchers and students were the hallmarks of his life and career at the University of Chicago.

Anyone who has frequented the microforms department in Regenstein Library since it opened in 1971 would recognize Ray, who began by overseeing this collection. Over the years, his responsibilities expanded to include the management of periodicals and, ultimately, all of the Regenstein reading room collections.

“He was an unfailingly friendly, unfailingly helpful face in the Library, known to thousands of people who walked through the doors—a bit of constancy in a sea of change,” said David Bottorff, Head of Collection Management and Circulation. “He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the microfilm collection that is not replaceable.”

Ray used that knowledge to help researchers find the particular piece of microfilm they were looking for, getting to know the visitors who returned regularly, where they came from, and what they needed. He also became a mentor to scores of students who worked for him over more than 40 years at the Library. In recognition of the important role he played in their lives, more than 50 UChicago alumni raised $75,000 in 2015 to create the Ray Gadke Internship Fund Established by Friends of Ray to Endow Undergraduate Internships.

Outside the Library, Ray frequently gave tours on campus, sharing his knowledge of the architecture, and he was widely known for his personal collection of religious statues, which started in the 1980s when Catholic priests who knew him from his graduate school research began giving him items from churches that were closing. The collection rotated, as he gave items from his collection to other Catholic churches and schools as new ones came in.

Within the Library, Ray was known for organizing staff donations to the Hyde Park and Kenwood Hunger Programs, collected at the annual holiday party in December.

He also donated rarely held religious studies materials and funds to the Library. David Larsen, Director of Access Services and Assessment, recalls a period when Ray would regularly come to the Library with liturgical works relating to obscure monastic communities in the Midwest.

“Ray was a wonderful University and Library citizen,” said Brenda Johnson, Library Director and University Librarian. “In memory of his parents, Ray generously established the Elden and Ruth Lauffenburger Gadke Endowment Fund to acquire, preserve, and provide access to books and other scholarly resources in religious studies. The fund will now become a lasting symbol of Ray’s kindness and of his deep commitment to religious studies. His good cheer, deep institutional knowledge, and longstanding commitment to students, researchers, library colleagues, and the greater community will be greatly missed.”

Which sections of the library do faculty members enjoy the most? The fall issue of Dialogo, the University of Chicago Social Sciences Division magazine, introduced its new faculty members in interviews that included this question. The answers give us some insight into their diverse influences and suggest the vital role that the Library plays in faculty research and teaching.

Joel Isaac is a historian focused on social and political thought in the United States and how the Cold War shaped political ideologies. His current research examines the revival of 18th-century categories of political and moral thought in the 20th century through more modern idioms: neoclassical economics, analytical philosophy, decision theory, and empirical political science. His first book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard, 2012), was awarded the Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 2012.

Isaac’s favorite section of the Library: “The Special Collections Research Center in the Regenstein Library. Before I came to Chicago, I made some pilgrimages across the Atlantic (from Cambridge, UK) to use the SCRC. Now its riches are on tap whenever I need them. I confess I get a special charge from reading the papers of former UChicago faculty who have deposited their papers in the archives of the SCRC. It’s a thrill to see the University through their eyes.”

Destin Jenkins’s research as a historian centers on the linkages between the American state, capitalism, racial inequality, and the built environment in the 20th century. His forthcoming book, tentatively titled “Bonded Metropolis: Debt, Redevelopment, and Racial Inequality in Postwar San Francisco,” argues that the practices of municipal debt finance redistributed wealth upwards, reinscribed racial inequality, and became a constraint on democratic state power.

Jenkins’s favorite sections of the Library: “Regenstein Library is phenomenal. My favorite section is arranged by call number, E.185. From small pamphlets proposing solutions to the ills of late 1960s ghetto life to thick volumes dealing with black employment, most of the material in this section deals with the political economy of black life. The most interesting book I’ve found is a 1919-1920 report, “Colored Women as Industrial Workers in Philadelphia.” It’s been especially interesting reading the report alongside W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899). When Du Bois wrapped up this comprehensive study, at once sociological and a moral and political reflection on race and human civilization, he concluded that Philadelphia’s black women were largely confined to work as domestic workers. As elsewhere, World War I had thoroughly transformed the labor market. In Philadelphia black women arguably helped to facilitate industrial development, and, as track repair workers, inspectors, and porters, helped to maintain the city’s physical infrastructure. The Consumers League of Eastern Pennsylvania saw these opportunities as creating “a new day” for black women. I am looking forward to discussing this pamphlet and exploring the conditions under which black women toiled with students in my fall course, ‘Histories of Racial Capitalism.’”

Ryan Jobson is a social scientist and Caribbean cultural critic. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractive resource development, technology and infrastructure, states and sovereignty, and histories of racial capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial Americas. His first book manuscript, “Deepwater Futures: Sovereignty at Risk in a Caribbean Petrostate,” is an ethnographic study of fossil fuel industries and postcolonial state building in Trinidad and Tobago. A second research project will comprise a historical ethnography of oil and bauxite development in Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.

Jobson’s favorite sections of the Library: “As a scholar of the Caribbean, I enjoy exploring texts and materials produced in and about the region. I am particularly fascinated by original documents from the 18th and 19th century that I stumble upon in the stacks. On one of my first trips to the Reg, I was surprised to find a collection of late 19th century photographs of the Pitch Lake in Trinidad—the largest global reserve of natural bitumen asphalt. I later discovered that the photographs were donated to the university by the Barber Asphalt Co. on the occasion of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The gift coincided with efforts to structurally improve the roadways throughout the city, many of which were paved with Trinidad Lake Asphalt including Michigan Avenue and Jackson Boulevard. In my courses, I draw on anecdotes like this to demonstrate the enduring connections between places like Chicago and the Caribbean. Evidence of these connections often lurks in corners of the library or on the pavement beneath our feet.”

Alexander Torgovitsky

Alexander Torgovitsky, Department of Economics, Assistant Professor

Alexander Torgovitsky’s research is focused on developing new methods for causal inference and counterfactual analysis with economic data. His recent work has focused on developing tools for detecting and measuring state dependency (“stigma” effects) in unemployment dynamics. Other recent work has provided tools for extrapolating inferences from studies of small research populations to larger groups, with implications for understanding behavior and for policy making.

Torgovitsky’s favorite section of the Library: “I enjoy the student-run coffee shop (Ex Libris). The coffee is great, and I like the way many of the facilities at UChicago are run by students, unlike at many other private universities. It reminds me of my undergraduate institution, and I think it helps foster a strong sense of academic community.”

Alice Goff, Department of History, Assistant Professor

Alice Goff

Alice Goff is a historian of modern German cultural and intellectual life. Her work focuses on the relationships between material objects and political thought in the 18th and 19th centuries. Goff’s current research traces the history of artworks caught up in the looting, iconoclasm, and shifting boundaries of German states during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars and the consequences of their displacement for German political, religious, and intellectual practice at the beginning of the 19th century.

Goff’s favorite section of the Library: “For browsing, I most enjoy the folios or oversized sections of the library. No matter the call number, the folio shelves always have something monumental and strange to offer: the most lavish exhibition catalogues, the most beautiful atlases, the most unwieldy information, though unfortunately also the most cumbersome to get back to the office.”

Mikhail Golosov

Mikhail Golosov, Department of Economics, Homer J. Livingston Professor in Economics and the College

Mikhail Golosov is an economist specializing in macroeconomics, public finance and political economy. His research explores economic theories related to wars over resources, tax systems, and strategic communication. He is an associate editor of Econometrica and the Review of Economic Studies.

Golov’s favorite sections of the Library: “I like to read social science books that are not directly related to economics–sociology, history, philosophy—so I often gravitate towards those sections of the library. Researchers in those disciplines study human society, just like economists do, but often have a very different perspective. I find that I can learn from that a fair bit. Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate was one of the most fascinating books I read recently.”

Peter Hull

Peter Hull, Department of Economics, Assistant Professor

Economist Peter Hull develops novel statistical techniques to answer policy questions in education and health care. Currently a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research, he will come to the University of Chicago campus as a Becker Friedman Institute Research Fellow in 2018, and will join the Department of Economics faculty in the summer of 2019.

Hull’s favorite genres: “Apart from econometrics textbooks (only somewhat kidding), I’m torn between biography and science fiction. At their best, both genres amaze me in their ability to illustrate a set of foreign ideas, places, and times, all through a strong narrative structure; if only more academic papers had that ability! Recently I’ve been addicted to Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, while every winter am excited to crack open Gardner Dozois’ most recent Year’s Best Science Fiction short story anthology.”

Exterior view of the Albert Merritt Billings Hospital, part of the University of Chicago Hospitals complex. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf7-02257], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

The University of Chicago History of Medicine Project (UCHOMP) is marking the 90th Anniversary of the opening of Billings Hospital, the predecessor of UChicago Medicine with some special events in the Joseph Regenstein Library. Join us on Friday, October 27, 2017 at 2pm – 4:30pm for an open house in the Special Collections Research Center featuring “Treasures of Medicine in Chicago.” The open house will be followed by a lecture given by Mindy A. Schwartz, M.D. “Happy Birthday Billings Hospital- The Library Connection: A Tale of 3 Billings.” The lecture will take place from 5pm – 6pm in Regenstein Library Room 122. The events are open to all University of Chicago faculty, staff and students and to the general public.